If nothing else, I am a man of time and convenience. Rarely will you wait on me if we are meeting for lunch. Unless there are circumstances outside of my control, I will be at the airport before your plane arrives to make sure you are not waiting on me at the baggage claim with  suitcases your carry-on luggage (stupid baggage fees). Stacey would say that I am leashed far too closely to my watch. At any given moment of the day, unless I’m sleeping obviously, I am pretty much aware of what time it is or what time it is not. For instance, I know that it takes me 23 minutes to wake up, take a shower, get dressed and get out of the door if don’t need to shave that particular morning (three-ish more if I do have to shave). A bit psycho? Maybe. But I hate being late.

I also hate having to take time to eat breakfast (the most important meal of the day?) or make coffee in the morning. This is a problem though, because I’m not one that can skip breakfast. Anyone who works with me will vouch too, that I cannot go without caffeine. It took me quite a while to get a sustenance routine down in the wee small hours.

Iced Coffee

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In Houston it seems like the fruit trees, azaeleas, and vegetables have been blooming their hearts out for weeks now.  Our peaches and apples set fruit in the latter part of February, after putting on quite the floral show.  We had almost 100% of our seeds germinate and our tomatoes already have blooms popping out.  So what the heck is wrong with the Black Mission Fig and especially, the Santa Rosa Plum?  If there was one tree in all of our garden that we were looking forward to, it was the Santa Rosa Plum.  After this and this appeared, I felt like we had no choice but to buy one.  Here we are now in the advent of Spring and it seems like nothing can coax this guy out of hibernation—at least not any blossoms.  Yesterday though, I did notice a tiny hint of green.

Signs of Life-Santa Rosa Plum

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In doing research on High Density Home Orchards, I kept running across a term that I felt deserved an explanation.  The word “pleaching” seems to be a catch-all for several similar techniques that were implemented in the formal gardens of the ancient Roman Empire.  Generally speaking, pleaching is yet another tool at the urban gardener’s disposal.  Like espalier, pleaching is a method used to train normally unruly trees into visually striking, and space defining features.

For our purposes, a more laid-back approach to pleaching was the perfect solution for the citrus trees that we wanted to plant on the west side of our home.  We have a long, blank wall that opens up to our neighbor’s parking lot. As exposed as it is, it comes off extremely dull and boring.  To give an idea of perspective, we have roughly four feet from the side of our home to the back of our neighbor’s curb.  Closest to the curb, we have an espaliered fence consisting of apple trees, plums, and peaches.  At its highest point, the espaliered fence is three and a half feet tall.  In trying to bleed this property of every bit of it’s plantable space, we had the idea of planting our citrus trees behind the espaliered fence, and train them to grow straight up before we let them branch out and into each other, similar to to the below picture.

Pleached Trees

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Being incredibly busy over the last week, I have not found a whole lot of time to do any serious writing. I did however, find a couple of minutes early in the morning before work, to snap a few pictures of the goings on in the garden. As soon as things slow down a bit, I’ll get into more detail about what we planted, what we planted in, and how we planted everything.

Heirloom Tomatillo Seedlings

It is hard, in my opinion, not to say enough great things about catchy, technical buzz words or phrases. I can’t get enough of them. Besides being efficient forms of communication, they make people sound smart when talking shop with others. Just think about it. You and I may be sitting in a restaurant talking about our various landscaping projects…riiiight. Because we are excited about the topic, we’re speaking a little bit louder than is probably acceptable. The couple at the table next to us can’t help but eavesdrop on our conversation and oh how impressed they are when they hear us drop phrases like “High Density Home Orchard.” We’re very special people.

Barn Wall Espalier

I’m not really sure how to break this news. Maybe the best thing is just to get it out there. This morning as I was driving to work after dropping into Empire Café for coffee and a muffin, I rounded the corner of Fairview and Dunlavy streets and saw this devastating scene.

Bye Bye...

For the inaugural post, I figured it was most appropriate to begin with our garden and this year’s plans for it. Although the blog will cover much more than gardening, it felt like a good place to start.

We were fortunate to purchase a house that was a blank slate when it came to the landscaping. Once the boxes were unpacked, we were able to shift our focus to what we were going to do with our extremely long and narrow lot. At first glance, it seemed as though we would be infinitely limited in what could be cultivated in such small spaces.

Caney Creek Citrus-Courtesy of John Panzarella